


We're Doing It wrong

by Ihsan997



Category: Command & Conquer (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-13
Updated: 2017-06-13
Packaged: 2018-11-13 19:14:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11191608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ihsan997/pseuds/Ihsan997
Summary: What happened to the Scrin after the foreman lost?





	1. Part 1

A/N: this takes place in the immediate aftermath of the Scrin campaign in Tiberian Sun 3. I don’t own C&C, the factions involved or the named characters here.

Explosions rang out from every direction save upward, lighting up the surface of the measly planet known as Earth. The nauseating landscape of green vegetation and blue liquid water became slightly less offensive due to a combination of the residual beautification of tiberium as well as the fire, smoke, light and heat released by missile impact and unstable military vessels on the ground and in the air. For untold miles of the planet’s surface, both the natives of the planet and the loyal minions of his expedition felled and were felled themselves, firing at will as the worst of the ill-fated conflict continued to rage on. Foreman 371 couldn’t help but feel a slight sense of loss upon watching the last of his staff fall, even if they did manage to take a number of the Earthlings with them prior to total destruction.

Too soon and too late simultaneously, Foreman 371 could feel the beginning sensations as his remaining vessel and its crew were drawn into the localized wormhole. While safety was guaranteed due to the near ignorance of physics on the part of Earth’s native species, he could not but wallow, albeit for a few moments, in self pity. True, none of his peers had ever been sent into such hazardous work conditions previously, but that fact was the main source of the devotion he’d assigned to his task. His failure to overcome the overwhelming odds rested heavily on his shoulders. Far more heavily than the infuriated officer who proverbially invaded his ship’s communications systems once he’d reached the outer rim of the Solar system.

Not even the beauty of deep space outside the windows of his ship’s outer ring sufficed in relaxing Foreman 371 against the verbal onslaught he received once the wormhole closed. “What sort of audacity is this!” the Supervisor’s familiar warbling voice boomed in the outer ring’s relatively spacious command unit. The half dozen surviving crew members fell into disarray, either diving behind equipment or trying to look busy as their commander bore the brunt of the fury.

More from fright than defiance, Foreman 371 reacted without pause. “The sort borne of strong preservation instincts?” The rhetorical tone wasn’t lost on him, and his antennae drooped as he glanced around and strategically kept the Supervisor’s image on the communication screen to his back.

“Self preservation is above your pay grade!” the Supervisor shouted angrily, so angrily in fact that his glowing image on the screen rippled once Foreman 371 finally turned around. “Your irresponsible indulgence in base instincts has cost us an extraction fleet that costs-“

Even though the Supervisor’s mandibles continued to move, no sound emitted from the loudspeakers. For a few seconds Foreman 371 held the breath in his advanced respiratory system, and two crew members even garnered the courage to glance up at the silent screen. When the Supervisor’s facial spiracles puffed and then released, his defeat became more apparent; his audio had not only been cut, but had been left waiting as if a point was being demonstrated. His compound eyes burned with fury denied, though if that was the worst that they all would face, then they’d happened upon arelatively fortunate cycle indeed.

Crowding the communication screen, a second glowing face appeared, energized in a subtler and more august manner. Foreman 371 straighten up his carapace out of respect, even when a portion of his surviving crew skittered away. Their new interlocutor, so rarely seen or heard, didn’t mince words or waste time on formalities.

“Your ship has been scanned,” echoed the voice of the Overlord. Time stood still on the Earth expedition’s mothership, its only surviving ship, every time the Overlord paused. “Are there survivors beyond the minions and crew members aboard?”

“N-no, Overlord,” Foreman 371 stammered. He kicked himself internally for the shakiness of his voice, though all things considered, none of his crew would try to exploit his moment of weakness later. After all, the whole lot of them were more than aware of just who was addressing them.

When the Supervisor’s mandibles moved again, the infuriated insectoid’s video feed was cut, leaving him mute and invisible but neither deaf nor blind. One of the crew members even gasped, the discipline of the Supervisor in defense of a mere surveyor ranking as an event none of them ever expected to witness again.

Only when the Overlord appeared satisfied that order had been reasserted did he continue. “Congratulations on your life,” the ethereal voice echoed, following the statement with a pause sufficient for the awe to strike all the listeners.

After a minor dizzy spell, Foreman 371 regained enough common sense to respond to the near impossibility of such a compliment. “Thank you, Overlord,” he replied, bowing slightly due to a simple loss as to how he should respond to a courtesy never shown.

“You will submit a full damage report to whatever personnel and materiel you managed to salvage. You will be resupplied with enough tiberium catalysts to reinfect Earth’s surface, enough staff to infiltrate the planet’s native population and stimulate rapid growth and harvest, and enough minions to put down any possible resistance. Make no mistake: this is no longer solely an extraction operation, and you are no longer solely a civilian officer.

“You will evolve into your new promotion and responsibility. You will not contact central command again while empty handed.”

There was no tag question for clarification at the end, nor even a nod to signal that the explanation of tasks had finished. The Overlord merely paused and stared at Foreman 371, waiting until the gravity of the situation dawned. Furtively rubbing the top of one of his pincers with the other, he did at least muster the additional audacity to clarify one matter of pertinence.

“We will not fail in our mandate, Overlord…I’ll see to it that our ship’s AI is upgraded and entrusted with the task within minutes.”

He could only imagine the rage of the Supervisor over the now silent communication line, fuming only minutes after having ordered the reformatting of the ship, and thus the wiping of its trusted and ethical AI. The Overlord, of course, was none the wiser, and unknowingly handed Foreman 371 another victory.

“That’s correct; you won’t. Now, remain on standby while I engage in a private discussion with the Supervisor. He will contact you momentarily and give the green light for your initial preparations.”

Without another word, the second image disappeared from the screen, leaving the entire crew to sit tensely in the ship’s command unit. Not even the infrared beauty of the Andromeda Galaxy off in the distance lessened the tension in the unit, and one of the younger crew members even quietly wept over lost comrades and frazzled nerves. As short as the interlude was, those few minutes were the most harrowing of Foreman 371’s chemically extended life.

After a period of time which felt strangely short, the Supervisor’s image reappeared in the screen. The glowering eyes and tightly pursed mandibles of a beaten man stared at Foreman 371, creating a mental image that he’d remember for decades to come.

“Engage in your damage report, and submit it to me within the hour. Repair drones will be sent at that time, alongside a list of all supplies, staff and troops set to arrive. Funding for the invasion of Earth as well as a preliminary establishment of a base on Europa will also arrive at that time; the items on the list won’t arrive until that base is complete. Supervisor out.”

“Have a wonderful cycle,” Foreman 371 replied impulsively before the Supervisor was able to angrily cut the feed.

Whether the sheer audacity of his unplanned line had driven his crew mad, or they were truly relieved to simply be alive after such a disaster of an expedition, the half a dozen people inside the command unit burst out into laughter all the same. With every last one of their cybernetic minions gone, they were entirely without any sort of defense system other than the walls of their mothership. Earthlings were too primitive to reach them at such a distance, of course, but the thought was still harrowing. And there, in the Solar system, alone and inside of a damaged ship, the survivors of the three hundred and seventy first expedition crew were laughing like children.

Noticing the disturbed weeping crew member’s distress, Foreman 371 patter her on the back of her carapace with a pincer as he motioned for them all to return to their work stations. “Nobody can claim what we claim, recall what we recall, or view the universe in quite the manner that we do,” he said, to himself as much as his staff. “We’ve lost our defenses and even our robot labor; we’re going to run the minor maintenance jobs ourselves, repatch and rebuild, and simply be happy that we’re alive. Mothership?”

Answering the only name any of the crew members had for the ship’s AI, the automated voice replied all around them. “Yes, Foreman 371? The damage report?”

“It’s good that you were listening, though I wish you hadn’t heard the Supervisor’s ranting and raving against you. Yes, please run a full damage report, and don’t exhaust your self-preservation systems in response to him; nobody is reformatting you as long as I’m the officer of this mission.”

“Of course. Scanning all systems now.”

Retiring into his chair on the observation deck, Foreman 371 turned slightly to the mothership’s navigator as they all breathed a little easier. “To the natural satellite known as Europa,” he sighed comfortably as the outer ring rotated.

“Absolutely,” she replied, operating the holographic controls to send the gravitational manipulators into action.

Stars and gases off in the distance remained stationary due to the sheer size of celestial bodies, though the occasional particles of space dust bouncing off of the mothership’s force fields signaled that they were in transit. All in all, the expedition was looking to be a success even in light of the material losses upon their first attempt.

“Earth will fall,” Foreman 371 murmured, echoing the Overlord unknowingly.


	2. Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Non-canon brainfudge of scrin interaction with mammals.

Reinforcements arrived gradually, increasing in tandem with development of a proper outpost on Europa as well as the acquisition of allied cultists among Earth’s natives. Given the welcome addition of climate control on the Europan base, and the crew members of Foreman 371’s ill-fated expedition began to feel as if they were on a proper Scrin settlement.

Permanent assignment to a natural satellite left the original mothership’s navigator with little to do, though her substantial stipend prevented her from complaining about the lack of entertainment on the outpost. As was the case on many a Jovian day, she found herself in the portal hangar alongside one of the portal operators, ignoring the skittering of the shock troopers practicing their formations for the umpteenth time.

The operator shut off the analog screen they’d been watching near one of the lowly humming portals, sighing as the two of them slumped in their chairs. “I never thought cryovolcanism would become boring to me…but here I am, tired of seeing ice volcanoes.”

“If you’ve seen one sleet-filled caldera, you’ve seen them all,” the navigator replied. When one of the shock troopers crawled by more closely than usual, her own boredome drove her to interfere. “Hey, watch this.”

Until the errant shock trooper passed the two of them by, she pretended as if she hadn’t noticed. Once the bulky automaton had its back to them, she raised her arms for the portal operator to see. A few simple movements and her pincers flicked open and shut. The sound clacked only in the immediate area, but the desired result occurred and had them both nearly in stitches.

As if it truly understood, the shock trooper stopped crawling in its tracks, waited for a few seconds and rotated around to face them. Staring at the navigator expectantly, the cybernetic creature bobbed up and down on its many legs, displaying what looked like a rudimentary form of sentience.

“Ha ha! It thinks it’s people!” the portal operator chuckled, a rare display of humor among the typically passionless ranks of the Scrin.

“Wait, wait, wait, watch!” the navigator laughed in reply as she clacked her pincers in full view of the shock trooper.

Compound eyes flickered as the partially organic robot processed her action, and soon enough it dipped its body down beneath its knees again, bobbing up and down a few times as if to request a continuation of the primitive game. Given that there was little else to do, the two of them enjoyed a few more rounds of charades with the construct until the incident occurred.

Without any escalation, the portal began to crackle, and the purple film within the charged circle shimmered with movement. “What the…?” the navigator gasped as she stumbled out of her chair. “I thought nothing comes through unless we allow it?”

“Not if we leave it operational, even on standby…oh, this is terrible!”

Shock troopers mobilized, falling into a more aggressive formation than they’d been engaged in when only performing drills. Even the robot that had been playing the game with the two of them rushed to form a circle around the high portal, filling the hangar in a chorus of chittering and clicking. The portal operator vigorously worked the controls, attempting to figure out just what was teleporting from Earth to Europa without their prior knowledge.

“It’s definitely not one of ours, but it doesn’t fit a biological pattern that our systems recognize!” the flustered operator cried. The hum of the portal increased in frequency, though without a proper commander the shock troopers showed restraint and waited until the dark figure materializing in the portal fully emerged.

Smoke filled the immediate area as the otherworldly being entered the base’s transportation hangar. Most of the Earthlings were quite a bit larger than the navigator, yet the creature which walked through to their base appeared to be even lower to the ground than her knees.

“Oh my stars, what is that hideous monstrosity!”

Like a beast from the dawn of the universe, the Earthling came. Hairy and furry and fleshy and moist and pungent, the native of the blue planet stepped in front of the amassed Scrin fearlessly. Its glistening eyes swept over them in a greedy manner, complemented by its disgusting nose dripping with some sort of liquid. The tail appendage pointed offensively in the air as if threatening to fling pointy hairs at them, surpassed in its grotesque nature only by the Earthling’s abhorrent genetalia, which were actually on the outside of its body.

The navigator and portal operator clung to each other in terror, hiding behind the shock troopers yet also peeking out at the living atrocity that had sought to contaminate their base. It’s fleshy face, lacking an exoskeleton and thus sharing the same consistency as its internal organs, wrinkled as if the master of all ugliness intended to speak.

“Meow.”

“KILL IT, KILL IT WITH FIRE!” the navigator screamed.

Vision was blotted out as the shock troopers attacked, frying the invader from Earth to a crisp. The entire area around the portals heated up noticeably as their defenders blasted, leaving nothing but ash, mammalian hair and a smoldering stain on the hangar floor. The two organic Scrin clung to each other for a while, shivering and unsure of what to do.

Finally, the navigator gathered up the bravery to speak, though her more advanced eyes never left the portal for fear that a second eldritch horror might still pass through. “Wh-wh-what do we tell Foreman 371?” she asked her colleague nervously.

After a few moments, the portal operator appeared to have regained normal, sane consciousness, or at least as much as one could after witnessing the terror which named itself Meow.

“It’s time…the invasion. It’s time for the invasion. Earth is on to our plan…but I never imagined we’d have to face down such an eerie little demon as this Meow!”

A/N: I took some liberties, obviously, though that’s what Westwood gets for never actually showing us what organic Scrin look like. I hope my continuation of the now failed company’s unfinished thread managed to entertain. :)


End file.
